


red thread

by dreamtiwasanarchitect



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Dark, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dysfunctional Relationships, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:41:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27567664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamtiwasanarchitect/pseuds/dreamtiwasanarchitect
Summary: They cannot break apart, but they can break each other.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 12
Kudos: 91





	red thread

**Author's Note:**

> Written for this kinkmeme prompt:
> 
> "They killed each other many times... but they also raped each other. (Many times? D:) Maybe it starts as hate!sex. Can be dubcon if you can't make it noncon.
> 
> I want the dark dark version of Joe/Nicky. Like no matter what, they will be together."
> 
> Some serious tainted love vibes. Not super graphic but very dark.

“It was always going to be like this,” Nicky hisses. “And it will be like this forever. We tangle, we stretch, we never break.” 

“Shut up,” Joe tells him. He thrusts in dry and Nicky screams, claws at his back kicks at the back of his legs, but it’s like he said—their connection is unbreakable. 

This is inevitable. 

“You and I, bound together,” Nicky says, eyes bright. 

After, Joe wipes the blood off his cock while Nicky tends to his ripped hole. His eyes are red and his cheeks stained with tears. He cries—and comes—every time. 

They crawl under the sheets and say nothing. 

Joe wakes up in the middle of the night with his face pressed to Nicky’s neck.

This, too, is inevitable.

———

This special violence between them was mutual nearly from the beginning, but it was around the fifteenth century that Joe really started to give as good as he got. 

Nico was the muse of the greatest artists of the time—later to be known as the greatest artists of _any_ time—and seeing their eyes on him unlocked a new, previously unexplored level of wickedness within Joe.

It was the way they looked at him—like he was pure. Angelic. 

Joe knew better. And Nicky was his, besides. 

Nicky protested—“not here, someone might see”—but Joe pushed his clothes aside and held him down. 

He ruined that pale, perfect skin with his gnashing mouth, his bruising hands. It didn’t last—it never did.

———

Nicky cooks Joe’s favorite foods and feeds him little bites. Joe buys Nicky flowers from the market. 

They hold hands on the street and they share the same clothes. They have inside jokes that go back 800 years. 

They know everything about each other, including their worst parts. The things that are always there, deep under the surface of their easy affection—the urge to lash out, to make the other ache. 

They cannot break apart, but they can break each other. 

———

It began after the second time Nicky killed him, which was after the third time he killed Nicky. 

He gasped back to life, the stab wound in his gut closing, but pain still radiating deep inside him—and above him was Nicky, then still a nameless Frank, breathing stale breath on Joe’s face and splitting him in two. 

Joe pushed, punched, shoved, scratched—and got a knife through his hand, pinning it to the ground. He felt the heat from Nicky’s seed inside him, then the warm rush of blood spilling from his own slit throat.

Two days later, it was Nicky felled by his blade, and Nicky who woke in the midst of his own violation.

Nicky didn’t fight, not that time. He stared at Joe with his cosmic eyes. Joe felt like he should look away as Nicky wept like a blushing virgin, as he came against Joe’s bloodied tunic, but he watched the dirty invader unravel until he, too, was undone.

Those eyes had a lock on his very soul. When he finished and pulled out, he offered his hand. 

Nicky grasped it, and—if they had not been already—it was then that they were bound.

———

When the door to their room closes behind him, Nicky seizes Joe’s curls and slams his head into the wall. 

While the world spins around him, he feels Nicky pressing behind him, pulling down his pants.

“I saw the way he looked at you,” Nicky seethes. He bites Joe’s neck until he draws blood. 

“What are you talking about,” Joe grinds out.

“That arms dealer. He wanted to have you. To _fuck_ you.” Nicky spins him around. He slaps Joe’s face and pushes apart his legs. “But you’re mine.” 

The offending hand is held in front of Joe’s stinging face. He licks it as messily as he can. His own spit is the only thing that eases the way for Nicky’s cock. 

Joe tries to squirm away. He can’t help but resist—it’s instinct. Survival response. Something Nicky doesn’t always seem to have, not on the nights he goes limp and pliant while Joe tears him in two. 

“Stop fussing,” Nicky tells him. “I know you can take it.” 

He’s been taking it for a very long time.

———

Andy asked, once, back when he was Yusuf and she Andromache and she saw him scouring his own skin late one night. 

“He does this to you?” she asked. He realized she must have seen him limp from the tent, or perhaps she had heard his cries. 

“We do this to each other,” he told her. 

In the dark night, he could not read her expression. “I can help you put a stop to it,” she said at least.

He shook his head. “It cannot be stopped.”

———

After several pints with Booker, Joe stumbles home. 

“I missed you,” Nicky says, and he makes it sound like an accusation. 

Joe trips over his own feet as Nicky pulls him to the bedroom. 

He doesn’t fight—maybe it’s because he can’t, and maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to.

There’s something nostalgic about Nicky having him like this. 

“Please,” he says again and again, with no sense of what he’s begging for. “Please, please, please.”

Nicky puts a hand over his mouth and keeps fucking him. 

———

Their tentative truce first took them far from the field of battle. They were cordial, if not companionable, during those first months, until one day word of the fresh atrocities in Jerusalem reached them. 

They made camp and lay down to sleep. Turned to face Joe, Nicky’s eyes reflected the moon.

Joe took him that night, put him on his back and tore his clothing nearly to shreds. Nicky tried to fend him off, but when he bit Joe’s arm, Joe punched Nicky’s chest so hard he lost his breath, and then he was still. 

Being inside Nicky felt like reparation. 

Nicky grabbed at his shoulders and cried. 

“I love you,” Nicky said in Joe’s native tongue, and then they both came. 

That night, and every night after, they shared a bedroll.

———

One night, Joe jolts awake, his face wet with tears. Though he’s healed, the phantom pain of Nicky forcing himself on Joe remains.

He lets out a sob. 

“Joe?”

Nicky shifts so they’re laying face to face. He rests a gentle hand on Joe’s cheek. 

“What is it, my love?” 

Joe shakes his head and buries his face in Nicky’s neck. 

Sometimes, when they trade these soft touches and kind words, it’s possible to believe the brutality between them is only a nightmare—some dark reflection of what Joe fears about himself, about Nicky, about their love. 

“Nothing,” Joe tells him. “Just a bad dream.” 


End file.
